I am a photographer from East Hertfordshire/Essex/London. I started this blog to share some of my photography ideas and thinking. This blog is a mixture of my photography, thinking behind some photo shoots and some equipment reviews. The reviews are just my user experience and nothing more. My passion is portraits, editorial and fashion photography.
If you have any project that need a photographer, please get in touch. My website is at www.yattang.net

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Monday, September 24, 2012

Product Photography

With the autumn coming in the UK, it is starting to get cold
and wet. With some time on my hands, I
tried some product photography at home.
What better than photographing my photographic equipment? This is my attempt at product photography and
it proved much more difficult than I first thought. My early attempts were just not good enough
with harsh lighting and burnt out reflections.
I had to experiment a little before the images came out in my vision.

The first photo here is all my Olympus micro four third
gears. They were lit with a Nikon SB26
with a shoot through umbrella left of camera with a large white reflector on
the right. I shot it on my wooden floor
to add texture to the image. Post
processing using Capture One involved reducing saturation, increasing contrast
and adding -2EV vignette around the frame.
I quite like the outcome.

I also shot a couple of my Canon lenses using very similar
lighting. This time, instead of using a
reflector, I had a gridded Canon 540EZ on the right to fill in shadow. Using my Olympus 45mm F1.8 on my E-PM1 to
reduce the DOF, I was able to blur out the background quite well. These are the results.

Canon 17-40mm F4 L USM

Canon 24-105mm F4 L IS USM

What have I learnt? The
objects you photograph must be immaculately cleaned before the shoot. Looking at my photo at 100% will show up so
much dirt and dust, it is unbelievable! I
am looking to experiment with product photography more this winter when I am
not shooting portraits outdoor. These are nice images, but they are hardly creative. How to make the images stand out? That is what I will try to work on.